I mentioned this once in a talk to a group of lunching ladies in Kansas City, soothing their apparent disquiet by adding that by "soon" I was speaking in geologic time, and that meant about 250,000 years, by which time all humankind would be extinct. A woman in the front row exploded with a choleric and incredulous rage: "What?" she said. "Even Americans will be extinct?"-- Simon Winchester in today's Guardian.

Comments

It seems awfully unscientific to think that humans will be extinct in a mere 250,000 years. H. sapiens only emerged about 200,000 years ago give or take, and the average mammalian species lifetime is a million years.

As apex predators, Americans may go a little bit sooner than that, of course.

"For what if the kind of event that we have seen this month, and which caused us all in Europe such commercial inconvenience, is in fact not just a minor volcanic hiccup, but the beginning of an event that causes in time a mass extinction..."

I wondered how long it would be before someone in the posh papers pressed the apocalypse button.:)